Abstract:

This paper is set during a precarious post-pandemic transition period, early in 2023. In this time of continuous change, we asked ourselves, as teacher-researchers, what is most important to focus on? Working with children who have been living lives interrupted, socially, emotionally, and educationally, and with teacher candidates experiencing similar disruptions, what should our main concern become?

As a classroom teacher, I (Michelle) had been through a process of re-entering face-to-face education with children aged 8-10. They had been living lives separate from traditional schooling, mostly learning online. As I encountered them in the physical school setting, I found, through observation and listening, that their personal and educational needs had changed over time. I decided what was called for in an urgent way was a human approach. I needed to focus on humanness. But how? I reached for children’s literature.

In parallel, I (Terry) was involved with teacher candidates who were continuing their courses in hybrid and in online settings and were seeking answers to questions about who they were and how they wanted to be as teachers. At the same time, they were asking who their students had become during the global pandemic. They enrolled in my second-year course on Teaching Through Children’s Literature. We found many texts that contributed to their search for possible pathways.

In this article, we explore individually and together in conversation, some of the books we found most powerful in inspiring humanness through strong characters portrayed in stories of courage, love, hope, truth, humour, and other qualities of humanness – stories our students could connect with deeply as human beings. In our quest for a wide array of high-quality texts, we used Rubine Sims Bishop’s (1990) enduringly influential metaphor of “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.” With our students, we found illustrated children’s books where individual students, both children and adults, found themselves reflected as in mirrors; texts where they were able to look through windows and create possible visions of their self-identities; and story worlds where they were able to see and move through sliding glass doors to enter into the experiences of persons both like and unlike themselves, in all their diversity and complexity. The article explores some of these texts and what they meant for us, for our students, and for our learning community.

Keywords:

Children's literature, humanness, wellness, post-pandemic living and learning.